LORENZA MAZZETTI’S first novel, The Sky Falls, was a strikingly effective child’s account of the war in northern Italy. The sequel, RAGE (McKay, S3.95), concerns the adolescent miseries of the same highstrung, tomboyish narrator, and if it is less impressive than the earlier book, the fault belongs to circumstance rather than to the author. Her angry, bewildered, deathhaunted protagonist is entirely persuasive, but so many novels about recalcitrant juveniles are published these days that even one as good as Rage is bound to seem, at times, an echo.
In THE REAWAKENING (Atlantic• Little, Brown, $4.75), PRIMO LEVI describes his journey from Auschwitz, where the Germans had barely missed killing him, home to Italy. For reasons which only the confusion of the year 1945 can explain, he went by way of Minsk and Ploesti. He was often unwell, more often unfed, and almost constantly unwashed. He was also subject to continuous official lunacy. His account of his adventures is nevertheless full of humor and, more remarkably, a charitable interest in the doings of his fellow pilgrims. This tale of inadvertent vagabondage is not only a vivid footnote to history; it has, of ail unlikely qualities, charm.
JACQUES-ALBIN-SIMON COLLIN DE PLANCY was a nineteenth-century French author, not much above the hack level, who wrote an astoundingnumber of books under an even more astounding number of pseudonyms. One of his major enterprises was the construction of pseudoauthoritative compendiums of the pseudo-scientific and the pseudooccult, including a Dictionnaire Infernal. Some 170 items from this work have been translated by Wade Baskin as the DICTIONARY OF DEMONOLOGY (Philosophical Library, $6.00). Considering that the Dictionnaire, in its sixteenth edition, was “augmentée de 800 articles nouveaux et illustrée de 500 gravures, parmi lesquelles les portraits de 72 demons,” Mr. Baskin’s work is a drop out of the well. Many of the translated items have been cut, Mr. Baskin apparently nursing a prejudice against De Planey’s anticlericalism, his diatribes against superstition, and his humor. Phis Dictionary of Demonology serves no purpose that I can see beyond the misrepresentation of poor old Collin de Plancy, but it contains one misprint London for Loudon — which conjures up hilarious religious-sociological visions.
All of which leads to MONSTER FESTIVAL (Vanguard, $4.95), a collection of spooky fiction edited by Eric Porter. The stories are the usual mixture — Poe, Stoker, and O’Brien, with some unexpected moderns as leavening — but the illustrations, by Edward Gorey, give the book a genuine, if melancholy, distinction.
DAVID BRADLEY’S LION AMONG ROSES (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $5.95) records two years spent in Finland as a teacher of English. Dr. Bradley went to this job in style, with his wife and live children, and the assorted reactions of the tribe have been assembled into a book which gives a far more comprehensive view of Finnish habits than a single observer could achieve. It is a pleasant book which contrives, without didacticism, to convey a great deal of information about Dr. Bradley’s reserved, witty, resourceful hosts and their handsome but difficult country.
PHILBROOK PAINE’S REPORT FROM THE VILLAGE (Norton, $3.95) is a collection of essays (it would perhaps be more accurate to call them sketches) about New Hampshire, where life balances on an absurd border line between urban simplicity and bucolic sophistication. Mr. Paine writes a column for the New Hampshire Sunday News, but one does not need to be a local to grasp the point of his jokes.
TRACK OF THE BEAR (McKay, S5.75) by WILLIAM BIXBY is the biography of a ship. The Bear was built in 1873, a steam sailer destined for the Newfoundland sealinggrounds. She sank in 1963 in tow to Philadelphia, where it was proposed to make her into a floatingrestaurant. In between, she rescued the Greeley expedition, patrolled Alaskan waters for the U.S. Revenue Service, went south with Byrd, and worked around Greenland during World War II. This career permits Mr. Bixby to dredge up a lot of interesting marine history.